The present invention relates to a method and to a device for guided keyword-based exploration of data stored in a database.
Data analysis is a process which is useful in discovering relevant information in, suggesting conclusions from, and supporting decision making based on data stored in a database.
For example, analysis of historical data can offer valuable insights into past activities, transactions or interactions, which may in turn be used for predictive purposes. Hence, analysis of data stored in databases holds great importance for tasks such as strategic planning in large organizations. Data analysis can, however, be particularly challenging for non-technical users. One primary reason for this is that extensive knowledge of the underlying data and their data model, i.e., the way the data is structured and interrelated, is required in order to formulate queries which yield meaningful results.
Another primary reason is that user interfaces for data access usually cater for the needs of multiple groups of people with diverse access interests to the data. This results in user interfaces progressively becoming more feature-rich and difficult to operate. Even when exploration of data is facilitated by graphical user interfaces, users are typically exposed to its full complexity while using only a small fraction of its functionality. A well-known way to simplify user interaction is using keyword-based search.
Ways to search structured databases using keywords are proposed by DISCOVER (see reference [1]), DBXplorer (see reference [2]), BANKS (see reference [3]). Their key idea is that, given a set of keywords, the system looks for trees of tuples (candidate networks), connected through primary-foreign key links, that collectively contain all the query keywords. Despite the use of keyword-based search in above mentioned references, no simple and intuitive ways of exploring structured databases are published.
In Facebook's Graph Search (see references [4] and [5]), the underlying Unicorn (see reference [6]) system suggests, upon keyword input by the user, a list of possible queries to search the user's social graph. A set of hard-coded rules, e.g., ‘in’ denoting a location, is combined with different tokenizations of the keywords before the possible queries are ranked.
Accordingly, it is an aspect of the present invention to improve exploration of data stored in a database.